The large field productions put on every year during half-time and pre-game performances of professional, college and high school games require a great deal of planning and design. Perhaps the greatest amount of time involved in organizing these events is the planning and design of the performance drills. The placement and movement of the individuals comprising the organizations performing a drill is a time consuming and complex procedure.
There presently exists a number of products for assisting individuals in drill design. The most widely used of these products comprise computerized drill design aides allowing a drill to be created by computer. However, presently existing computerized drill design aides suffer from a variety of drawbacks that increase the time and effort required to design a drill. First, most presently existing computerized drill design aides require a user to generate from scratch a drill formation at each transition point within a drill. A transition point comprises a starting or ending point where one drill formation transitions to another. For example, to illustrate a square formation transitioning to a circle formation, a user would have to draw the square at the initial transition point and then the circle at the ending transition point. This of course requires a great deal of time and effort on the part of the drill designer for more complex drills formations.
Presently existing computerized drill design aides also lack the ability to provide automatic animation. In order for a user to illustrate a point between two transition points, the various points between the transition points have to be manually created in order to demonstrate the animation flow between the transition points. This limitation increases the time required to design a drill and limits the number of points a user is able to illustrate within the drill. Finally, presently existing computerized drill design aides only allow a particular drill design to be used with a specific number of individuals. If the number of individuals involved within the drill should increase or decrease, the drill becomes useless because the computerized drill design aide does not allow for resizing the drill to accommodate a differing number of individuals.
Therefore, a need has arisen for a computerized drill design aide that enables a user to more quickly and efficiently design a drill, provides automatic automation functionalities and provides various functionalities to ease the design and redesign of drills in a manner superior to presently existing systems.